First things first, the overall flexibillty of LaFemmes rig is very good.
Especially the arms and shoulders can mimic and match even the extrem movements of the human body.
One area however is missing this abillity and that is the neck and head.

I have made two images with Lafemme, Victoria 4.2 and Project Evolution in which

all three share the same poses, to illustrate what I'm up to....

Even the old Victoria 4.2 bends more natural then LaFemme, but in my opinion the PE does the best job in this case.
Fun fact: I was pretty much convinced that PE has one extra bone area in the neck, but it turned out, all three figures have only one neck bone and one head bone.
The noticabel difference is the placement of the upper neck bone connection to the head bone.
Both, Victoria 4.2 and PE have them located close to the base of the skull, LaFemmes neck bone is connecting to the head bone at the half way of the neck.
The influenced mesh area of the neck bone is ending way to far away from the base of the skull.
Is this only me, or was this noticed before, even got fixed by an update of the figure I wasn't aware of?

If not, I would love to see this fixed with the next version of Poser.

What do you think?

Ready to eat the worms from Mama Bird 

If no one noticed before and no problem ticket was submitted, I would doubt that it will be addressed in P13.  So far, I haven't seen any complaints in the forum concerning this problem.

Thanks hborre, I didn't saw any complains regarding this issue in this forum, that's why I open this thread. I really don't believe for a second that I am the only one who noticed it. To be sure I made this two pictures. Do you think it's worth trying to fix it?

I definitely think that it is worth fixing.  The creators of LF have received quite a bit of flack for not spending enough quality time developing a model to its full potential.  Support has also been so-so with specific vendors trying to generate continuing interest in the Poser community.  The model has potential but the enthusiasm is simply not there.

I feel like a pose like that would be distributed, part rotation of the head and part rotation of the head..

Looks better than your example, but I agree that it's not quite great.

I don't think any changes are coming to La Femme by now, she's been in the market for a couple of years now. But there have been some tweaks and fixes in the form of freebies and products, perhaps someone would be willing to tackle this one?

Hi @Ohki, I'm glad that you can see the problem too, because I starting to think I'm overreacting.

I actually made several attempts to fix this.
The progress so far, I re-grouped the neck and head and changed the position of the neck and head bone.
The tricky part is to get the weight mapping right so that the head and neck geometry are working together.
So far, I got some strange looking results, but I like to try it until it works.
Maybe you can give me a hint on the weight mapping process I should use.
It has three options if I remember correctly; delete, add and replace.
I have not really that much of experience in that matter, so I just go by try and error.
Add seemed to me an obvious choice, because that way I can work with whatever the figure has and build upon it.
The problem that comes up now is, that the open mouth morph seems to influence part of the geometry that I re-grouped from head to neck.
That causes the throat to deform unexpectedly, the chin moves like a canopy, it's looking bizarre.   
But it's actually fun to work on LaFemme that way. Until to this point in time I only posed her and did pictures of her, this is now a completely different field of work.

If you regroup things, you'll break every single morph on her.

You could just tweak the weight mapping without any regrouping at all. If necessary, the Joint Editor has a button to let you add more groups to the bend influence without needing to regroup anything.

Or you could go the easy but messy way of just creating a JCM :)

Oh, ok... Now I understand why Sasha has a morph to  bend/twist the neck and the head at the same time. I was find this handy (satisfying my natural laziness - lol)

Afrodite-Ohki posted at 5:58 AM Wed, 11 January 2023 - #4453615

If you regroup things, you'll break every single morph on her.

You could just tweak the weight mapping without any regrouping at all. If necessary, the Joint Editor has a button to let you add more groups to the bend influence without needing to regroup anything.

Or you could go the easy but messy way of just creating a JCM :)

JCM would probably be the best route. 

1. Pose the head and neck as desired.
2. Create a new dial in the Morph Palette, named "Head Back" or whatever you want to name it.
3. Use either Morph palette or ZBrush to fix the shape as desired.

So far, that morph dial ONLY affects the morph. But you can also have that morph dial pose the head and neck in the correct position as you dial it. For that you have to use the Dependencies editor.  Basically, when the head is at normal default position, the morph and the neck and head poses are set to 0. When the head is bent back, the head and neck are posed to whatever you created the morph at, and the morph dial is set to 1.

These tutorials might help in that regard. Same principle.

LF Dev Rig 6 - Editing JCMs

LFDevRig7-Editing Compound JCMs

@Ohki

Thanks for the advise.
JCM's are basically multiple morphs controlled by one bone movement, right?
If I remember correctly, it is done in this dialog who one can teach the bone to control the movement of other bones and morph targets as well.
You select the bone and start recording what other parts of the skeleton should move accordingly, right?
The hint with the adding of groups without re-grouping is also very useful, it did not came to my mind, like at all.
That is much to cover, I will keep posting my results as soon as I make progress.
This is getting really interesting.

@DCArt

Thank you for helping me out, again!
Like I wrote in my comment above, as soon as I have something useful, I will let you folk's know.

There's a LOT to content creation. Take it one step at a time. That's how we all learned. We were all newbies at one time or another. 8-)

👍

Honestly V4 and PE look even less natural. Heads don't bend back like that unless they're on a pike. There's skin and fat tissue that compress and bulge at the base of the skull and top of the traps bulge a bit as they contract to pull the head back. I think that's what LF's rigging was aiming for.

At any rate, I made this correction morph in about 3 minutes. Setup was another 2.

You can also get a similar result simply by adjusting the right neg bulge map on the head bend to about 0.180 in the joint editor. It's set to 0.10 by default.

I made a full suite of JCMs for LF a couple years ago. I won't  bother wasting my time commenting about any of my opinions on the topic...

Anyway, I saw this thread and I remembered my JCMs I had sitting around collecting dust. I tidied up the files for the neck ones, they're essentially just smoothing corrective morphs. Not too overt, nothing fancy, but an improvement to most of the distortions.

There aren't any multi axis valueOp JCMs included here but there are OFF/Subtract valueOps for each JCM, and a global OFF switch. You can easily turn off and on everything rather than being stuck with the JCMs being on. It's similar to LFs built in JCM override.

Not my best but maybe useful to someone... the morphs are Creative Commons Attribution License.

pr_HeadNeckJCMs_LF

Lol. Cross post with AmbientShade...

AmbientShade posted at 12:57 AM Fri, 13 January 2023 - #4453793

Honestly V4 and PE look even less natural. Heads don't bend back like that unless they're on a pike.

Hi @AmbientShade, thank you for your answer.
I tend to disagree about what you wrote and would like to show you why.

This are only two of many Yoga Poses and both showing exactly what I was talking about. You see, no pike required.

But thanks for the hint with joint editor, I will look into it.

Hi @primorge, thanks for sharing your work. I installed it and run some posing test with it. So far it's quite close to what I had in mind.
Creative Commons Attribution License means I can base my work on yours, if I give you credit for your work, provide a link to the license and indicate that I made changes, right?
I would not want to get into any legal trouble over some trivial like a hobby.

blackbonner posted at 4:43 AM Fri, 13 January 2023 - #4453805

Hi @primorge, thanks for sharing your work. I installed it and run some posing test with it. So far it's quite close to what I had in mind.
Creative Commons Attribution License means I can base my work on yours, if I give you credit for your work, provide a link to the license and indicate that I made changes, right?
I would not want to get into any legal trouble over some trivial like a hobby.

Sure. You're welcome to use the morphs in whatever capacity with the stipulations you mentioned.

Due to LF's neck topology I think really the only way to get more realistic bends out of her neck would be with something like subdivision level JCMs (at this point not possible) or a re rig. Her neck is basically a low poly cylinder with no musculature edgeflow baked in. You need to consider also how one rotation effects another, with something like the neck with so many axis of rotation compounded by a like actor such as the head which also has a pretty free range of rotation. You can quickly get bogged down creating multi axis JCMs and correctives to correct correctives if that makes sense.

Anyway, I said I wouldn't linger with my opinions on LFs neck or Poser figure's necks in general. I've found that the best bends I've seen have come out of figures with 2 bones for the neck. I'm sure with a bit of finessing of LFs existing rig better results can be had, but really in the end you can end up with a situation of diminishing returns to labor investment with trying to fix everything with correctives. I've created some monstrously complex JCMs for odf's Antonia 1.3 figure that I'm sitting on at the moment and to say there were a lot of migraines induced with value operations would be an understatement.

Sometimes with Poser figures you just need to accept the limitations that there are and fix things with a final posed morph pass for your final renders, that is: Pose the figure in it's target pose and do a beauty pass sculpt to correct everything for the final render, a Beauty Pass sculpt.

Good luck, and I'm glad my humble morph set is at least a starting point for something more completely refined.

Quote:" Good luck, and I'm glad my humble morph set is at least a starting point for something more completely refined." Quote end.

I'm not quite sure yet if I can, but I think I can spend some time trying.
I agree on your opinion on the Two-Bones-Neck situation and it might be a path to what im looking for.
But you are also right that every "fix" or correction can cause other parts of the system to went south.
It's a bit like playing Dr. Tyrell's part in Bladerunner.
Asked for extended live expectency by Roy Batty he said he tryed but the subject died on the table because the changes created a deadly virus.
I hope you like this analogy, it just went to my mind during reading your comment.

blackbonner posted at 8:19 AM Fri, 13 January 2023 - #4453814

It's a bit like playing Dr. Tyrell's part in Bladerunner.

Asked for extended live expectency by Roy Batty he said he tryed but the subject died on the table because the changes created a deadly virus.
I hope you like this analogy, it just went to my mind during reading your comment.

Yes, I like the analogy. And apologies for the rather redundant phrasing in my last post. Suffering a bit of insomnia so my brain is short circuiting as I write these things lol.

Take care.

A final little note. Maybe not obvious in conjecture but very real in practice. Exercise caution when modifying the bends at the base of the skull in the back and sides. I by rote avoid fixes to this area as much as possible... but it's very easy to forget.

Hair caps will no longer fit properly without fixes to the caps also. Though caps have a tendency to go wonky there with those bends regardless something to keep in mind...

I can see the problem. And I already opened that cane of worms. I achieved the perfect bending with the second neck bone and... not a single face morph worked, the eyes, tongue and teeth are floating in space... really a funny experience. So I guess I have to re-shape all the morphs to the new head group geometry and get the head parts back to work in the dependence editor. Fine, I have a few days off left anyways, so let's go back to business.😳

I was looking specifically at the back of the neck and thought that's what you were referring to as well. I didn't see any mention of yoga poses in your initial posts.

@ambientshade

No problem, you are right, I didn't mention it. I sometimes have to apologize for how I try to communicate in a foreign language, with people from a different upbringings. So, sometimes I mess up.😁